My d wasn’t going to take AP Lang next year until she heard that it isn’t any harder than honors English 11. She figures she might as well take the AP class if it’s the same difficulty.
Our school does recommend kids taking honors level classes of matching AP courses take the AP exam as well.
Updates as the semester winds down:
The AP calc AB test was Tuesday and D19 (one of the first two sophomores at her school to take the class for it, in an experiment by the school) has had time to mentally/emotionally process the exam, and is feeling like she probably got a solid 3 on it, which she is totally cool with—she absolutely loves calculus, but what she really loves is playing with it and seeing what it can do, so the sort of stuff you get on AP tests isn’t her priority.
And not even a humblebrag, just a straight-up brag: Yesterday she was invited to take the (really incredibly easy, to be honest) placement test to allow her to take dual-enrollment first-year-composition during her junior year, which is on the books as only available to seniors.
(Of course, her grades aren’t the sort of 8.72-on-a-4.0-scale level you see so often on CC—she likes to take advanced stuff whether she’s ready or not for it, which means her grades sometimes suffer, but she seems to thrive on the challenge, so we figure why not let her?)
Anyway, she’s now into her semester-ending “intensive” (basically, a setup like some LACs May minimesters), so she’s enjoying taking a half credit of German (which isn’t normally offered at her school) to close out the academic year. Now that the testing and regular coursework is over things are a lot less high-strung around the house, and so I’m enjoying that, myself.
Yay, she survived!
She said the exams were better than she expected. Now she needs a bit of downtime before tackling a huge amount of homework. I don’t think a few of the teachers realized she had two exams today and sort of piled it on.
S19 felt the AP World went pretty well. We shall see how on or off he is when the scores come out.
S19 took the Calc AP AB exam yesterday. He felt solid on the multiple choice and not so much on the short answer. Well, we’ll see. In many ways, he is a stronger math student than his sister, but she was sure was good at standardized tests. Hmm, I guess I missed the deadline to sign him up for the SAT II math in June. Just as well, as he is pretty tired from school and athletics. He feels like he hasn’t had a free hour in ages (which is not true. I hear him watching youtube videos all the time).
Last night he was frustrated about doing poorly on an in class essay on ‘gender roles’ in The Color Purple. He started to weep a bit from frustration because he said he read these prompts and has no idea what to write. ‘I wasn’t thinking about gender roles while reading it!!’ I tried to reassure him that no one else was thinking about that either while reading and to think of the prompt as a puzzle to solve by thinking about what is in the book. His response was " I hate analyzing texts. I hate it. I hate it.’ So, I wasn’t very successful.
S19 finishes his 4th AP tomorrow and is done. Hurrah! It’s been a long week of AP mornings with Music Theory on Monday, Calc on Tuesday, World today, and Geography tomorrow–all a.m. exams. The only really strong teacher was the one for Geography, so we’ll see how he does on the others when scores are released in early July. In the meantime, I like your strategy, @mom2twogirls of reducing stress about scores.
Impressed with some of your kids taking challenging AP tests as sophomores.
Kids at our school can only take AP World History in 10th grade. That’s it. No other Ap classes until junior year, and you have to meet the requirements to get in. Right now my son plans to take 1 AP next year, and then 2-3 senior year.
He was thinking of adding another one next year, but needs to talk with his GC first. He’s going to have a tough enough schedule as it is, all Honors level classes physics, pre-calc, etc.
He has had so much work this year as a sophomore that with his daily schedule I don’t know how he’d get any more work done. Poor kid does not have much free time aside from participating in his ECs which he likes. But no lounging around at home.
Happy Mother’s Day
No APs over here. S19 took AP Comp Sci this year. We decided to give him a pass on taking the test. He said maybe 5-6 kids in his class didn’t take it. GC said not a big deal.
Did well in the class but hated it. And this is from a kid who has yet to hate any subject! I just couldn’t bring him to ask him to spend more time studying for the AP. I’m almost relieved that he found something he can check off of his list of possible majors. He also discovered that he’s not really interested in any job that requires sitting in front of a computer all day, so that’s helpful too. Since he won’t be an engineering major or comp sci major, he wouldn’t use any credits he gained from the test anyway.
Next year it’s AP Calc, APUSH, and AP Lang. Senior year probably AP Lit, AP French, AP Stats, AP Physics, AP Macro…so he will have plenty of AP tests to take in the future!
Happy Mother’s Day, @carolinamom2boys, and to the other moms on this page. :x
S19 had confirmation today. Pretty cute, during the joys and concerns portion of the service he piped up with a concern for support for kids taking AP tests these pasts weeks and a joy that it was over. So everyone celebrated that joy.
LOL!
Long tiring weekend here. Son19 is working on a project for school, had an all day track meet on Saturday and a soccer match today.The weather has been cruddy here in NE, supposed to finally warm up later in the week.
Son19 did really well in the district track meet and qualified for the State event. He broke 2 school records for sophomores, and is just shy of the all time record by a few tenths of a second. He thinks he’ll break the record next season. Most of the kids he was competing with yesterday were 11the and 12th graders, but his school sent a pretty strong contingent of sophomores and even some freshman to the district meet. They should have a solid team in the next few years.
Happy mothers day to the moms here!
Wow, track season runs late up north. In TX, D19’s regular season for track ended in March. With only district championships in mid-April. State championships were this past weekend, but only one person from the entire school qualified.
Track is still going on at my kids school here in NY too. My d22 is happy not to be the worst, lol. She isn’t going to any championships!
Hello, I’m new here! I have a D19, a D21 and a S23. Just found this website a few weeks ago and have been learned so much already. I already have a ton of questions but will just introduce myself for now.
We live in South Florida and D19 goes to the local public high school. She is in most of the advanced classes they have so far. Our school does the AICE program - have any of you heard of that? Seems like it is mostly a Florida thing. So far she has taken 5 AICE classes, 5 AP classes (Environmental, Capstone Seminar and Research, Biology, World History) and 2 honors classes. We may be scaling back next year due to the way the school forces you to take the AP and AICE science classes as a two period block (the won’t let you take stand alone AP science) and that causes her to have no electives which is frustrating.
She is a smart kid who works hard and gets almost all A’s but she really has no extra curricular activities. We are going to be working on that a lot more this summer and next year. She played violin from Kindergarten through 8th grade but our teacher moved away and she quit. She and her sister have been teaching themselves other instruments since then. She volunteers with a program called TOP Soccer which is a league for kids with special needs. She loves anything to do with the ocean especially scuba diving - I’ve been trying to convince her to start a scuba club at school for the last few years but so far she refuses.
Nice to meet you all - can’t believe I am starting to think about college already,I feel like I was just there myself!!
Nice to meet you! It sounds like your d does have good ECs to me, with the TOP soccer and her own scuba diving.
Of course, that opinion is coming from a mom of two introverts, lol. They would mutiny if I tried to force them into some of the number of activities I read about all over CC.
@gusmahler we have to wait for the snow to melt off the track to start in late March.
At the meet the other day the high temp was about 45 degrees with a cold breeze. I wore a down jacket, hat and gloves. It was a bad day for a track meet, hardly anybody got a top time. Too cold to warm up and run fast.
That should change for Thursday when the expected high is 90 degrees. A full 45 degrees warmer than just a few days ago, lol. That’s the north east for you!
Welcome @momtogkc ! Your daughter seems to be on a solid path with her education. Those are 2 interesting EC’s she has. Her passion for the ocean and scuba diving might make for a nice college essay topic down the road.
Welcome @momtogkc ! Your kid is just amazing with all those APs and interesting ECs! With scuba, soccer, and violin she comes across as a well rounded person. Does she have a scuba certification?
My kids are waiting for the summer vacation. They have big plans to travel with their dad this summer. I keep reminding D that she is still taking Math SATII in June. She is a good test taker. But, lately, she just wants to be done with all the testing. I can only imagine the next year’s testing season with this attitude…
Thank you for the welcome! I guess reading so much on CC has me nervous about her ECs - I feel like everyone I read about has 12 ECs and tons of leadership experience! I was frustrated with D19 because she missed the deadline to sign up for National Honor Society. I didn’t know about it (now I know I have to check school website a lot more often!) and she never told me. The good thing is that is what made me realize we might be behind in other areas and that is how I found CC. Maybe not so good for her because she went from having a relaxing summer to me telling her she is now taking an SAT class this summer and taking the test in the fall. 
Her tests are almost done. She has to take EOC (end of course) exams in every class, AP exams and AICE exams. Not sure exactly how many she has left but it seems to be slowing down. The one thing I am sad about is that she has her final AICE bio exam June 6th which is the week after school ends. For her 16th birthday I had promised to take her to NYC to see her best friend (lives up north) and had already booked tickets leaving June 3rd not knowing about the test. Now we have to cut the trip short but at least we still get to do a quick visit.
From reading here on CC, I’m not sure that NHS is super important anyway.
Our school doesn’t begin to induct until spring of junior year.